Recorded Future is the world’s largest threat intelligence company. Recorded Future’s Intelligence Cloud provides end-to-end intelligence across adversaries, infrastructure, and targets.
Marie Brattberg, Chief Engineering Officer, shares details on Recorded Future and what it’s like to work there.
In this Video
We discuss:
- Details on Recorded Future
- Use cases for the platform
- Their use of AI
- Customer examples
- The Mastercard acquisition and the latest at Recorded Future
- The culture at Recorded Future
- Why now is a great time to join Recorded Future
Video Transcript
Keith: Marie, thanks so much for joining us.
Marie: Thanks for having me, Keith.
Keith: I’m excited to talk to you because we’re going to talk about Recorded Future, which is one of the world’s largest threat intelligence companies. It’s definitely an anchor piece of the Boston Tech ecosystem and has gone on to do amazing things. But for people that aren’t familiar with the company, what is Recorded Future?
Marie: Yes. So, as you mentioned, Recorded Future is the world’s largest threat intelligence company. What that means is we have about 2,000 enterprise customers around the world who subscribe to, use, and integrate our threat intelligence into their security organizations and security operations for proactive defense, automation, etc. In addition to that, we actually have more than 45 governments who use our intelligence in their national-level defense as well. We are about a thousand people around the globe and we are a Swedish-American company. Our founders are Swedish, and that’s also where we have a lot of our engineers.
Keith: You’re actually based in Sweden, right?
Marie: I’m actually based in Sweden. Yes.
Keith: So what’s the main, the primary use cases for the platform?
Marie: There are many different use cases for the platform. The core use cases include, obviously, threat intelligence analysts who are doing research in our platform. They’re looking for threats that are a priority to them because the world that we live in today there are millions of threats every day, but all threats are not a risk to you. So the trick is really to figure out out of all of those threats what is applicable to me.
The way that Recorded Future works is that we basically collect the part of the internet where this type of data lives. That is the open web of course, but it is also the darkest and deepest corners of the internet, like the dark web, for example. But it’s also proprietary sources and net flow traffic.
The user of Recorded Future would consume that intelligence either by:
- Doing research: Trying to understand who the threat actors are, where they are, what their motives are. All of that data lives in the platform.
- Subscribing to signals: The platform would provide signals that you can integrate into, for example, your security operations so that you don’t have to manually push those signals to your security tools, but you automate that through the portal.
Those are like the key use cases I would say.
Keith: And so as you were just talking about some of the things you’re doing so I would imagine this is a perfect use case for AI as well.
Marie: Yes, it’s definitely a perfect use case for AI. So, you know, we’ve been doing collection and structuring of data for 15 years. When you put that in the context of AI, you can see all the opportunities you have there to do something pretty amazing.
Recorded Future is an AI-first company. We always have been. A lot of those manual use cases that I mentioned that analysts had to do in the past, you can now automate. The platform would just basically summarize the outcome that you’re looking for automatically. We’ve had the opportunity to really ride the wave of AI through all of those years, and it’s really given us a competitive edge. The future is, of course, agentic and pretty exciting from that perspective as well.
Keith: Now the customers for Recorded Future, is it mainly like, you know, enterprise customers or is it a mixture of, you know, small midsize companies?
Marie: There’s definitely enterprise customers because you need some sort of security maturity to be able to have proactive defenses and become intelligence-led. We have the biggest companies in the world as customers of ours, but everyone needs security and intelligence. So we have customers in literally every industry.
Keith: About a year ago, there was some exciting news, an acquisition by Mastercard. So what’s the latest at the company?
Marie: Yes, so it is actually coming up on one year, which is pretty exciting. It has been a great experience so far. Mastercard is a great buyer, and I’m very excited about it because it is a strategic buy. They are really buying us because we have so many synergies. They have pretty incredible data, and marrying that with our data, there’s a lot of opportunity, especially on the fraud side.
Recorded Future is a very mission-driven company. Our mission statement for many, many years has been to secure the world with intelligence, and it’s very aligned to Mastercard’s goal of securing digital payments and creating a secure digital economy.
Structurally, and this was a decision from the beginning, we continue to operate as our own company, but we enjoy many of the benefits of being part of the Mastercard family.
Keith: All right. So you’re the Chief Engineering Officer at Recorded Future and you joined the company in the early days. So you’ve been through the full life cycle of its growth and now acquisition. What’s the culture like working there?
Marie: I think we all work here for the culture, and what is so amazing is that we managed to keep it. We are about a thousand people now globally. When I joined, I think we were about 25 people, and it is very similar still. It is a culture of helping each other and having each other’s backs.
We, as a commercial company, don’t just have commercial competitors; we’re actually competing with the adversaries as well, and that sort of unites you. We have a common enemy that we all want to beat. I think that does something to the culture.
It is the smartest people in the world that work at this company. I have worked with some of the absolute smartest technologists, product folks, intelligence analysts, and ex-intelligence community people globally. It is just a remarkable group of people.
Keith: Now top-tier talent regardless of market conditions, they always have options available for their career. So why is now the ideal time to join Recorded Future?
Marie: Because of the momentum and the desire for these types of products, and the opportunity to solve really, really hard problems for our customers. AI will emphasize, augment, and automate attackers’ or adversaries’ capabilities. And as defenders, as a society, we’re going to have to keep up.
The mission that we are on has never been more important. The technology that is available to us to win this race has never been more exciting. I can’t think of a better time to join us than now.
Keith: Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Recorded Future, go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings there. Go to venturefizz.com/recordedfuture and you’ll find their jobs. Marie, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great details on the company.
Marie: Thank you so much, Keith.
